The New Era GCC Talent Agenda (Part 3 of 5)

The New Era GCC Talent Agenda (Part 3 of 5 — A series on the conversations shaping the future of GCC leadership)

The second conversation: Reskilling and reimagining the workforce that built this ecosystem – and the roles each part of the system must play

There is a workforce challenge sitting at the centre of India’s GCC ecosystem that most public conversations are carefully avoiding.

Not because it is unknown. Because it is uncomfortable.

The transactional, process-driven work that built this industry over two decades – finance operations, HR shared services, IT support, data processing, compliance, customer service – is being absorbed by generative AI. Not eventually. Now. The hiring recalibration is already visible in the data. GCCs are moving toward expertise density, selective hiring at junior levels, and aggressive focus on senior professionals with 10-15+ years of deep domain expertise. The workforce that built the GCC ecosystem is facing the most significant disruption it has encountered – and the conversation about what to do about it is nowhere near as urgent as the situation demands.

This is the second conversation the GCC ecosystem needs to have. And unlike the first – which is primarily about leaders – this one belongs to everyone. GCC leaders. Academia. Training institutions. Policymakers. Each has a role. None of them can solve it alone.

The scale of what is happening

To understand the talent agenda, you first have to be honest about what is at stake.

India’s GCC ecosystem employs 2.36 million professionals. A significant proportion of that workforce built their careers on precisely the category of work that AI is now absorbing. These are not people who chose the wrong career. They chose careers that were entirely rational at the time – stable, well-paying, with clear progression paths inside large global organisations. The disruption they are now facing is not a consequence of their choices. It is a consequence of a technological shift that nobody fully anticipated at the speed it has arrived.

The moral dimension of this is worth naming directly. GCC leaders sit on large workforces. They have institutional power, influence, and a responsibility to this workforce that goes beyond operational decisions. The leader who manages this transition purely as a headcount exercise – optimising for efficiency, exiting the at-risk population, hiring the expertise-dense profiles the new era needs – is missing something important. Not just ethically. Strategically. Because the organisation that is seen to have abandoned its workforce in a moment of disruption will struggle to attract the talent it needs for the decade ahead.

The reskilling agenda is real, immediate, and largely underinvested. NASSCOM data shows that 72% of GCC leaders identify talent management as their top priority. It remains the most underinvested challenge in the ecosystem.

What GCC leaders can do – and what only they can do

The GCC leader’s role in this conversation is the most immediate and the most consequential. Nobody else has the institutional proximity to the at-risk workforce, the operational visibility of which roles are changing and on what timeline, or the authority to make reskilling a genuine organisational priority rather than an HR programme.

The starting point is an honest workforce audit. Not the kind that produces a headcount reduction plan – the kind that asks: which roles in this organisation are at risk, on what timeline, and what are the realistic alternative pathways for the people in them? That audit, done rigorously and transparently, is the foundation of everything that follows. Without it, reskilling investments are generic. With it, they can be specific, targeted and genuinely useful.

The reskilling agenda needs to be practical and time-bound. Finance professionals moving from transaction processing into FP&A, business partnering, and AI-augmented analytics. HR professionals building capability in people analytics, learning design, and AI-augmented talent acquisition. IT support professionals transitioning into AI operations, prompt engineering, and AI governance. These are not abstract future skills – they are the adjacent capabilities that the people already inside these organisations are best positioned to develop, given the domain knowledge they have already built.

Internal mobility is underused as a lever. Moving people from at-risk transactional roles into emerging capability areas – with structured support, real development investment and genuine career pathways – is both the right thing to do and the smart thing to do. The institutional knowledge those people carry about how the organisation works, what the global stakeholders need, and where the complexity lives is not easily replaced by external hiring.

The harder ask – and the one most GCC leaders have not yet fully made – is to champion this agenda within HQ. To make the business case for reskilling investment with the same rigour and persistence that they make the case for technology investment. The workforce transition is a strategic risk. It deserves to be treated as one.

What academia needs to contribute

The reskilling conversation inside GCCs addresses the workforce that already exists. But India’s GCC ecosystem will also need a continuous pipeline of talent built for the new era – and that pipeline runs through universities, colleges and technical institutions that are, in many cases, still producing graduates for a world that is changing faster than their curricula.

The gap is specific. Domain expertise combined with AI literacy. Complex problem-solving capability. The ability to work with ambiguity, synthesise across disciplines, and bring genuine judgment to situations where the data alone is insufficient. These are not the skills that a traditional degree programme – optimised for structured knowledge transfer and predictable assessment – naturally develops.

What needs to change is the relationship between academia and industry. Not the ceremonial version – advisory boards, occasional guest lectures, annual recruitment partnerships. The substantive version – GCCs co-designing curricula with universities, providing faculty who bring practitioner perspective alongside academic rigour, sponsoring research that addresses real challenges the ecosystem is facing, and creating structured pathways from campus into meaningful GCC roles that are not purely transactional.

The format of learning also needs to evolve. Shorter, more agile credentials – certificates, bootcamps, micro-credentials – alongside traditional degrees. AI literacy embedded as a foundational capability across all disciplines, not confined to technology courses. A genuine focus on developing the uniquely human capabilities – judgment, creativity, ethical reasoning, cross-cultural intelligence – that AI cannot replicate and that India’s GCC talent pool has the potential to develop at significant scale.

The institutions that move on this – that treat industry partnership as a core function rather than a peripheral one – will produce the graduates that the GCC ecosystem of 2030 actually needs. The ones that don’t will find their graduates arriving into a world that has already moved on.

What institutions and policymakers must address

The reskilling gap is not a problem that GCC leaders and universities can solve alone. Its scale – hundreds of thousands of professionals navigating a transition that no individual organisation has the resources to fully support – requires systemic intervention.

NASSCOM and equivalent bodies are positioned to develop sector-specific reskilling frameworks that work across the ecosystem. AI for finance. AI for HR. AI for operations. Certification pathways that are recognised by GCCs and enterprises. Train-the-trainer programmes that equip GCC L&D professionals to design and deliver reskilling at the scale required. Bodies like NHRD and ISTD bring something different but equally valuable – the convening power and industry relationships to put this agenda in front of the right people, create the conditions for cross-organisation collaboration, and ensure the conversation reaches leaders who might otherwise remain insulated from its urgency.

The policy conversation is the one that is furthest behind. Reskilling at the scale this moment requires is a national workforce challenge, not a corporate one. Government funding for reskilling programmes. Tax incentives for GCCs that invest genuinely in workforce development. Policy support for curriculum reform that gives academic institutions both the mandate and the resources to move faster. Investment in digital infrastructure for learning – because access to reskilling cannot be limited by geography or the cost of connectivity.

None of this is unprecedented. Other economies facing similar disruptions have built national reskilling frameworks with genuine government investment and clear accountability. India has the advantage of watching those experiments and learning from them. What it needs now is the political will to treat this as the strategic priority it is – not as an HR footnote to the AI transformation story, but as one of its central chapters.

What good looks like

I am not describing a distant ideal. Some of what good looks like is already visible in parts of the ecosystem – GCCs publishing workforce development strategies alongside business strategies, internal mobility rates increasing, academia partnerships producing genuinely capable graduates. The question is whether these become the norm or remain the exception.

Good looks like GCC leaders having transparent, specific conversations with their workforces about what is changing and what the organisation is doing about it – not managing the anxiety with reassurance, but meeting it with honesty and a credible plan.

Good looks like reskilling programmes measured by employment outcomes – whether people actually moved into new roles with new capabilities – not just completion rates and satisfaction scores.

Good looks like a generation of GCC talent that is genuinely competitive for the roles the new era will create – not because they survived the transition, but because somebody invested in them specifically enough to make it possible.

The question each part of the ecosystem needs to ask

For GCC leaders: if AI absorbs 30-40% of the work your current workforce does, what have you done – specifically, this year – to create a pathway for the people affected?

For academia: are you producing graduates who are genuinely ready for the GCC of 2028, or the GCC of 2018?

For institutions and policymakers: is the reskilling agenda being treated with the urgency and investment that its scale demands – or is it being managed as an important-sounding priority that never quite reaches the top of the list?

These are not comfortable questions. They are the right ones.

This is the third piece in a 5-part series on the conversations shaping the future of GCC leadership. The next piece addresses the new GCC value proposition – what makes a GCC genuinely, irreplaceably valuable in the AI era.

Rohit R Chowdhry is a GCC Leadership and Talent Advisor, Executive Coach and Author. He works with GCC leaders and CHROs on leadership evolution and talent capability for AI-era transformation. His work can be found at rohitrchowdhry.com

If you would like Rohit to share these perspectives with your leadership team – as a keynote, a roundtable conversation, or an advisory session – write to [email protected]